Scheherezade (& Her Sister) Shushed in Sunset Park

Last June, Sunset Park’s Target Margin Theater commissioned the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company, The Million Underscores, to stage “1001SUR” as part of its three-play festival News of the Strange Lab, which reimagines the classic story of The One Thousand and One Nights.

“1001SUR” begins as you might expect, with the foundational myth of Scheherezade’s story: royal cuckold gone hunting; horny, palace orgies of the unfaithful queen discovered; the subsequent campaign of rape, terror, and ritual murder the king mounts against womankind to avenge hurt feelings.

Into this mess walks Scheherazade, saving her own and her sister’s lives by weaving tales so powerful the king cannot abide but keep her alive for one more night to hear how they end. The one nights multiply into 1,001 nights, after which the king is in love and decides he will now stop murdering his wives.

Walking through the doorway and into the Target Margin’s Doxsee Theater, the temperature drops; the space is that cavernous. At 36’x98′, it was gratifying to see that enormity put to use so effectively to create the spectacle that was “1001SUR.”

In addition to co-writing “1001SUR” with Timothy Scott, Nicolás Noreña is credited as its director and scenic designer; it is in this last that the play most outdoes itself. Noreña used much of the 98′ not taken up by our seats to stage the long and deep rabbit holes of the story-within-a-story structure known to the 1001 Nights. As each successive storyline branches off from the previous, the stage telescopes out and away from the audience, revealed with the draw of each successive curtain as Scheherazade narrates.

The effect is of a visual glut; the stage teems with characters that the cast multiplies and moves into and out of with incredible velocity (often literal) and economy, most helped in the latter by inventive costume design evoking entire characters with the addition of just one or two costume pieces or props. The cast, with acrobatic endurance, does an incredible job sustaining the“1001SUR’s” zany, kaleidoscopic, manic energy. By its end, I was thoroughly exhausted on their behalf.

Despite its being, essentially, the story of a powerless, very young, female captive held against her will and raped and impregnated for years by an all-powerful male captor with all the tools of state at his fingertips whose emotions are large and conquering of every moral consideration, Scheherezade’s story is one often romanticized in popular culture. Ostensibly, it has a happy ending.

In its way, “1001SUR” explores this incongruous, patriarchy-fueled fantasy that dares imagine Scheherazade happy. When the vizier, who is her father, gives Scheherazade to the king – despite the certainty of the executioner’s blade the very next dawn – the cast collectively drops the satirical, maximalist tone in voice and body to repeatedly and hollowly intone the dirge:

“The vizier gives him his eldest daughter. The vizier gives him his eldest daughter. The vizier gives him his eldest daughter.”

The cast, at times speaking as a choir, shush Scheherazade and her sister, only to be – inevitably – asked to speak again on command when the king is ready for his bedtime story.

Noreña’s direction is anything but unimaginative: in addition to the telescoping stage, “1001SUR” tells its story via lip-synced cabaret sets; text projected above the stage that sometimes matched, and other times commented on, the goings-on underneath; tableaux vivants that constituted some of the very few pauses in the action.

Of these elements, it’s the text I’d miss least. First, there was the difficulty of seeing both it and the stage action simultaneously, the distance the eye had to travel between being too great; it felt like a lost opportunity.

The text’s need to explain weakened any power its rather trite conclusions might’ve had, and belied the confidence it opened with, daring the audience to keep up. In one of the most exciting visual sequences, an enormous boulder rolls downstage towards the king, who is a clear proxy for a different, more contemporary, also woman-hating, also verbally challenged ruler-dunce capable of uttering only the shortest sentences. As the king tries and fails to get out of the boulder’s way, and as it topples him and rolls over his prodigious body, the overhead text (not in so many words) suggests we should trust in the power of the Imagination – yes, capital “i” – to engender empathy, and through empathy, to conquer all.

Or something like that.